Peek-a-boo

I was coming in from coffee one morning and I saw him going out the window, just a green flutter of wingtips, and the dust, that bird-dust, that I was really slightly allergic to, curling off of him and glinting in the sunlight. Good. I was glad he was taking in some sunlight, and getting around town, talking to people. But we always got in a sticking point over his mad penchant for calumniation. I was struck dumb by his need to tell me every incident he had seen flying over back-alleys from my office to the quay – and always people I knew! Judge W. changing his girdle by the dumpster, Mrs. C. shaving in quite the reverse order – and out-of-doors! Mr. R. scavenging the dumpster for old muffins from the coffeeshop, and then sitting in the bottom of the thing, legs splayed in an "L," the balls of his feet pulled back, eating the whole trashbag full of them. I skipped over the question of why was he telling me these things to what I really wanted to know:
"What, Double-A, are you telling people about me?"
His beak would chatter a bit, and then he'd say, "You're paranoid!"
I didn't want to hear the dissembling any more than I wanted to hear the gossip. It was evident by the way people tried to take up in the middle conversations that had never started with me that the bird was up to something. Or it was just endless, senseless, niggling noise.
Perhaps I should have mentioned I have a disorder that gives me very bad reaction to big surprises. And to vague hinting around. How had I gotten stuck with this creature?
Still, I liked and could tolerate, and was trying to build tolerance for, a steady stream of small, pleasant, and maybe delightful surprises, by some controlled measure.
I worked all day, and he hadn't come back. So before closing up, I went in to change the papers under his work area. Something told me it was time to take a look.
First, he had a scrapbook, or collage kind of thing, references of some sort he had torn out of the celebrity magazines he loved. There was the Alien Queen that Sigourney Weaver fought, the queen's ovaries and breasts strung out and wound around and along the trusses and conduits of an immense basement. There were all kinds of collapsed things, wrecks of sorts. There were a bunch of popular images, the random mass-marketing-assigned cravings of the 18-44 male demographic.
Then there was the model, the thing. It looked like it could make toast, except it had round slots and the electrical cord hanging from it was frayed to look like a dandelion. It was on collapsed scissoring legs that had no way of being extended. The legs flopped around a bladder with a peek-a-boo window displaying dishwater with potato peels, oatmeal rubber, coffee grinds and general filth. Set back from the toaster console, the thing had some kind of suctioning device that smoked the ends of cigarettes in an enclosed bowl that was sealed well enough that I hadn't smelled it. All of it delivered the feeling of want without redemption, empty offerings. I suppose I had guessed he was making a gift for me, but this thing repulsed me, and the idea that he might present it to me made me nauseous. I wheeled around, and spotted a mess in the corner I hadn't seen before. The wall there was streaked with stains that all pointed toward a mass of rumpled papers. Moving closer, I saw he had lined it with the strips from burst perforations of my invoice forms, and in it were eggs, quite a prolific number, and not like the eggs he had been laying before, but fresh, and pulsing with internal effort.